Author:
• Saturday, November 01st, 2014

Sarah Addison Allen was born in 1971 in Asheville, North Carolina, in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains, from a housewife mother and a father who was an editor, a reporter and an award winning columnist in the local paper, the Asheville Citizen-Times. At the age of sixteen Allen wrote her first book: Once From Mood and in 1994 she obtained a B.A. literature Degree from the University of North Carolina at Asheville.

Sarah Addison Allen lives in Asheville, North Carolina, where she writes her novels. Her first book, Tried And True, was published in 2003 under her nom-de-plume, Katie Gallagher. The breakthrough came with her novel, Garden Spells, in 2007 followed by The Sugar Queen in 2008, The Girl Who Chased The Moon in 2010, The Peach Keeper in 2011 and Lost Lake in 2014. Her latest novel, First Frost will be published in January 2015.

Garden Spells – like The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami, One Hundred Years Of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez or The Shadow Of The Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon – is a magic realism novel which is a literary genre that tightly binds together unreal elements with realistic fiction.

Garden Spells, Sarah Addison Allen’s first novel, takes place in Bascom, North Carolina. It’s the story of the two Waverly sisters: the thirty-four-year-old Claire and the twenty-eight-year-old Sydney, who after being separated and scarred by life, reconcile after a long estrangement in order to cast off the Waverly’s bad reputation in Bascom which has lasted for decades and through generations. The two sisters decide to fight the adversity of life side by side and turn their supernatural gift legacy into a blessing instead of an affliction.

There is also their cousin, the seventy-nine-year old, Evanelle, as well as Bay, Sydney’s five-year-old daughter. The four of them, like all Waverly women, are gifted with magical powers and not forgetting the mysteriously prophetic apple tree in the Waverly’s garden, reminiscent of “The Tree Of Knowledge”: “If you eat an apple from that tree, you’ll see what the biggest event in your life will be”.

Claire has a considerable talent for growing plants as well as being a successful businesswoman. She sells and caters to the locals for most unusual food and drinks, like biscuits with lilac jelly, lavender tea cookies, honeysuckle wine, rose geranium wine etc.. All is prepared using her mystical garden plants which have special, bewitching, curative properties. Claire always has a remedy for people’s problems “that could be solved only by the flowers grown around that apple tree in the Waverlys’ backyard”.

Claire and Sydney were children when their mother left home abandoning them and they were consequently brought up by their grandmother who influenced Claire’s magical culinary practice. Claire grows up to be insecure and introverted. At the beginning she is reluctant to open up even to her sister, Sydney, let alone to Tyler Hughes, the newcomer artist living next door. In order to calm the ardour of her loving neighbour and make him forget her, she makes him a casserole with snapdragon oil and tarts with bachelors’ button petals containing magical powers from the plants and flowers in her back garden.

Sydney, the unruly younger sister is gifted with a “premonitory” acute sense of smell. She can smell someone’s presence before their arrival. After completing high school, Sydney leaves home when eighteen years old and returns back ten years later with her five-year-old daughter, Bay, escaping from her brutal husband, David. Despite her young age, Bay, being a Waverly, is skilled as well and she knows where things or somebody belong.

The seventy-nine-year-old, Evanelle Franklin has psychic powers in anticipating events. At any time of day or night, she can feel the urge to give people unusual gifts which appear useless but turn out to be very beneficial at a certain time and at a precise moment.

Bascom itself is a bizarre town where each family, like the Waverley’s, is known for a certain specific peculiarity that goes back generations: the Hopkins young men marry older women and the Clark women marry wealthy husbands and keep them under their spell with their sexual skill.

Garden Spells is an easy, entertaining read, the supernatural associated with horticulture makes the story a diversion from everyday realistic life. Sarah Addison Allen describes her writing style and genre as a “southern-fried magical realism, with a love story” and “fairy tale aspects, all stirred in a pot like a dish”.

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Category: Book Reviews
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